Technical Abstract:
Current methods for generating malting quality metrics have been developed largely to support commercial malting and brewing operations, providing accurate, reproducible analytical data to guide malting and brewing production. Infrastructure to support these analytical operations often involves substantial expenditures on dedicated instrumentation.
Dedicated malt quality laboratories also play an essential role in the continual development of new malting barley varieties that is critical for continued malting and brewing operations. Evaluations of potential malting barley varieties involve malting and quantifying the malting quality of a limited number of barley lines reaching the final stages of testing. However, getting to those few final lines requires years of testing of significantly greater numbers of lines that will never make it to the late stage evaluations. Winnowing down large numbers of early-generation lines to a smaller set of malting variety candidates consumes significant malting and malt quality analysis resources. In this study, we examine how well streamlined methods of malt quality analysis (using an isothermal mashing protocol and commonly available instrumentation) can predict the malts’ performance in full-scale, traditional malting quality measurements. If the streamlined tests can predict malting quality performance, they may be useful in providing a simpler, more cost-effective mechanism for initial malt quality screening. Additionally, being able to predict malt quality performance without needing to access capital-intensive dedicated QA instrumentation would enable simple malting quality estimates to be performed more widely, for example in classroom settings or in locations without access to full-scale malting quality assessment infrastructure.